Availability Assessment / Questionnaire

Service:Virtual Services Hosting Service

Service Owner:Michael Rosier

Review Date:07-26-2012, edited 9/4/2012

SLA/OLA Reference (DocDB):FNAL_Server_Hosting_OLA #4612

Service offerings

  1. Virtual Machines running Fermilab approved and supported Windows, Linux and Solaris X86 operating systems.
  2. Conversion of Physical Machines to Virtual Machines. (P2V).

Availability Management:

  1. What are the underpinning services that this service depends upon? (For example, network and authentication.)
  • Network Services
  • NAS/SAN Hosting Service(s)
  • Authorization Services
  1. Do the SLAs or OLAs of those underpinning services support your SLA?

Yes. After reviewing the OLA’s for the above services, each one of them does support the Virtual Server Hosting services OLA.

  1. If not, what steps have been taken to insure the required availability of your service? Has the probability of common failure of redundant underpinning services been examined?

The issue of common failures has been examined. The Virtual Services Server service was designed based on the underlying storage and network services, utilizing multiple network uplinks to multiple datacenters as well as dual storage fabrics spanning multiple datacenters. In order to provide greater availability to guest virtual machines, we can use features such as replication to ensure that critical machines are available even if an entire datacenter is unavailable. Replication features are available based on capacity and an agreement with the customer.

  1. Have the service owners of those underpinning services agreed to your requirements? Have you negotiated an OLA? Do you have a contact person documented for each underpinning service?

Yes. The Virtual Server Hosting service was designed in conjunction with the service owners of our underpinning services. We do have a contact person for each of the underpinning services.

  • Network Services (Anna Olivarez)
  • NAS/SAN Hosting Service(s) (Mike Rosier)
  • Authorization Services (Al Lilianstrom)
  1. Does your service have a maintenance window? Is the service available during maintenance?

No. We do not publish a maintenance window because we do not require an outage to any of the virtual machines during activities such as patching, upgrades, debugging, or firmware updates. Our virtual infrastructure management server (cd-vcenter1) is part of the monthly Windows patching cycle, which is the only regularly scheduled outage of this machine. There is no outage to virtual machines during this patching.

  1. Has a system architecture document been created that can be referenced?

Yes. A diagram displaying the hardware layout between FCC2/FCC3 can be found at: A description of the features and basic architecture can be found in the following document:

  1. Have the above been documented and reviewed by the Availability Manager?

Yes

Risks (to be filled out by the Availability Manager):

  1. No risks to availability identified.

Recommendations (to be filled out by the Availability Manager):

  1. N/A

Decisions (to be filled out by the Service Owner, Availability Manager and the Service Manager):

  1. N/A

Next Review Date:June, 2013

Availability Assessment Questionnaire v.2 2012-05-21